Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

DEFCON 22: 0 day notes (part 1)

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

DEFCON 22 sort of fires up today, though the real action doesn’t begin until Friday.

I’m not in Vegas again this year, for boring (money) reasons. Frankly, I’m also feeling a little burnt out. I miss Vegas (well, mostly, I miss Lotus of Siam) but I’m not sure I really miss dealing with that many people crammed into that small a space. I’m also not so sure that what happens at the conference makes that much of a difference any more. It seems like, to borrow the words of another better writer, “Nothing works and nobody cares”.

Or maybe that’s the depression talking. And the fact that my current employer made all of the videos from last year’s DEFCON available internally within a week of the conference.

So. If I was at DEFCON, what would I be attending?

As I said earlier, Thursday is usually kind of slow. I suspect I’d go to the “Data Protection 101 – Successes, Fails, and Fixes” talk; it sounds kind of basic to me, but you never know what you might learn. “Practical Foxhunting 101” also intrigues me. I went transmitter hunting with a friend of mine many many years ago, and I maintain a somewhat more than academic interest in the subject.

“Paging SDR… Why should the NSA have all the fun?” sounds like fun. Basically, this appears to be “how to decode pager traffic with cheap hardware so you can pretend to be Lester Freamon for fun and profit”. On the other hand, this conflicts with “RF Penetration Testing, Your Air Stinks“, a how-to talk for radio frequency penetration testers. I suspect I’d go to this one, and grab the slides from the pager talk later.

I know SCADA and the cloud are hot topics, but I’m not sure I’d go to either “AWS for Hackers” or “Protecting SCADA From the Ground Up“, simply because neither topic interests me that much. Nothing personal, presenters; they just don’t turn my crank.

I like the idea behind “Anatomy of a Pentest; Poppin’ Boxes like a Pro” and would be more likely to hit that than “One Man Shop: Building an effective security program all by yourself“. If I was working in a small organization, though, I’d probably go to “One Man Shop” instead.

Neither “Standing Up an Effective Penetration Testing Team” nor “In the forest of knowledge with 1o57” interests me that much, so I’d take another break here.

I’m slightly more interested in “Reverse Engineering Mac Malware” than I am in the Honeynets talk. And “RFIDler: SDR.RFID.FTW” sounds exciting: “We have created a small, open source, cheap to build platform that allows any suitably powerful microprocessor access to the raw data created by the over-the-air conversation between tag and reader coil. The device can also act as a standalone ‘hacking’ platform for RFID manipulation/examination.”

This is shaping up to be longer than I expected, so I’m going to break it into two parts. I will try to get a second part up tonight and at least cover the Friday and Saturday talks I’m interested in, if not all the way through to Sunday.

The full schedule is here, if anyone wants to look at it and make requests. I welcome comments from presenters and other people who are at DEFCON. And I will be trying to monitor twitter feeds and posting presentation links as I find them.

Posted in DEFCON 22, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch. (#45 in a series)

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014

Box Sized DIE is a public installation in a London banking district by Portuguese artist João Onofre. It’s a soundproofed, airtight black box. Inside, UK band Unfathomable Ruination will be playing death metal until they run out of oxygen, every day for most of July, starting on Sunday. The installation is part of the Sculpture In The City public art program by City of London.

My first thought: what do they mean by “run out of oxygen”? Does the band play until they pass out? If so, how will anyone know, given that the box is soundproofed and opaque? Do they just play until a certain CO2 level is reached? Do they have sensors and an alarm in the box?

My second thought: how long will the band actually play? Or, to phrase the question in another way, how long does it take to use up all the oxygen in the box? Apparently, this isn’t the first time a death metal band has played in the box (though it is the first time this has been done in London). Surely there must be some stats on this, like average length of time spent in the box.

My third thought:

My fourth thought:

Art F City argues that this is one of London’s “worst public art projects,” because “Passersby can’t hear them play, so what’s the point of choosing death metal over anyone else?” But there are many things we can’t see or hear directly from a sculpture. Onofre is charging the invisible core of the object with the specific force and drive of death metal. It’s black. It’s claustrophobic. It’s all angst. Of course it had to be black metal! Unlike most conceptual public sculptures, we know exactly what’s “inside.” Maybe it’s not the most subtle form of compacting tension and placing it into a public space, but I’m biased, so… \m/

Sounds like pretentious bullshit to me.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Geek, Music | Comments Closed

Once again, I say: Ha! Ha! And, Ha! yet again!

Monday, June 30th, 2014

From the NYPost:

Why waiters should be replaced with iPads

(Previously. Please note that my linking this is more for my own amusement, and should not be taken as an endorsement of the article; while I think it makes a good point or two, I also think it comes close to suffocating itself in the usual entitled whining that seems to characterize far too many (but not all) New Yorkers.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Geek | Comments Closed

William Gibson, call your office, please.

Friday, June 27th, 2014

One of my cow orkers sent me this link. As far as I know, it isn’t proprietary.

IPViking.

Warning note: this site seems to be optimized for Chrome.

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Ha!, I say. Ha! And Ha! again!

Saturday, June 21st, 2014

Together with tableside tablets that allow customers to order desserts and alcoholic drinks as well as pay their bills and play games without the help of a waiter, new technology has helped Chili’s address one of its customers’ biggest complaints — slow service — and add higher-margin items to its menu.

…

Mr. Roberts of Chili’s said about a fourth of the customers answered a survey about their experience, providing feedback. The system is so sophisticated that it can ask different questions to customers based on their orders, soliciting opinions on a new special or dessert item. A customer who has a coupon can opt to switch on a camera that will read it, or use the camera to upload a photo to Facebook or Pinterest.

Chili’s pays Ziosk a monthly service fee, but if enough customers opt to pay to play games on the system — trivia is the most popular game at Chili’s — it can make that money back under a revenue-sharing agreement.

…

The new system has helped the Braintree [Panera Bread – DB] location reduce errors in orders, which could run as high as six out of every 10, in that way increasing profitability, said Chris Hogan, its manager. It has allowed Mr. Hogan to put fewer workers at the cash register and more in the kitchen.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Geek | Comments Closed

Silly.

Saturday, May 31st, 2014

Our table at the banquet was only about halfway occupied, and some of my fellow diners were trying to scam additional deserts from the server. (“No, really, they just stepped outside for a couple of minutes. They’ll be right back!”)

The server brought over some extras, with the good-humored comment that “I’m not the Cheesecake Police.”

Which got me thinking:

  • How do you join the Cheesecake Police?
  • Is there a Cheesecake Police Academy?
  • Doesn’t “Cheesecake Police Academy” sound like some sort of cheap knock-off movie that you’d see on a low-rent cable channel in the 1980s? Complete with a very low rent version of Michael Winslow?
  • What’s the training like?
  • Is there a citizen’s ride-along program?
  • What do the uniforms look like?
  • What’s the duty gun for the Cheesecake Police? (Obviously, it should be some sort of Smith and Wesson.)

Why, yes, I am in a weird mood. Why do you ask?

Posted in Cops, Food, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 17, 2014.

Saturday, May 17th, 2014

Dr. Clyde Snow, legendary forensic anthropologist.

In Argentina in 1985, Dr. Snow and students he had trained excavated a mass grave where military death squads had buried some of the 13,000 to 30,000 civilians who vanished in a seven-year “dirty war” against dissidents. They found 500 skeletons, many with bullet holes in the skulls, fractured arms and fingers, and abundant signs of torture and murder.

In 1979, Dr. Snow helped identify many of the 33 boys and young men killed by Mr. Gacy, most of them buried in a crawl space under his suburban Chicago home. That year he also helped identify many of the 273 people killed when an American Airlines flight crashed and burned on takeoff from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, then the nation’s worst air disaster.

Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (which is briefly mentioned in the obit) is the book that sparked my interest in forensic anthropology. It appears to be out-of-print, but readily available: I commend it to your attention.

Also among the dead: Watergate figure Jeb Magruder.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Geek, Nixon, Obits | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014

Oh dear god, they have half-lives for the unstable elements.

–one of my cow orkers, in reference to this.

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Who holds back the electric car?

Tuesday, April 15th, 2014

By way of the Y Combinator Twitter, I found this rather interesting Fast Company article about “Better Place”.

Better Place was born to be revolutionary, the epitome of the kind of world-changing ambition that routinely gets celebrated. Founder Shai Agassi, a serial entrepreneur turned rising star at German software giant SAP, conceived Better Place “on a Davos afternoon” in 2005 when he asked himself, “How would you run a whole country without oil?” Four years later, onstage at the TED conference, Agassi, a proud Israeli with a bit of a Steve Jobs complex, wore a black turtleneck and promised, with the confidence of a man who has known the future for some time but has only recently decided to share his findings, that he would sell millions of electric vehicles in his home country and around the world. He implied that converting to electric cars was the moral equivalent of the abolition of human slavery and that it would usher in a new Industrial Revolution.

Shai Agassi was on FC‘s “2009 Most Creative People in Business” list. He was on the cover of Wired. Better Place raised almost a billion dollars.

And if being on the cover of Wired wasn’t a dead giveaway for you, they collapsed.

Agassi had assumed that the car would cost roughly half the price of a typical gasoline car and would have a range of at least 100 miles. Instead, batteries were delivered with a range of closer to 80 miles, and the terms with ­Renault meant he was selling an unsexy family car for about the same price as a nice sedan like the Mazda3 or the Toyota Corolla. (Not to mention that customers were asked to spend an additional $3,000 or so a year to rent the battery and pay for the use of charging and swap stations.)

I have been, and continue to be, somewhat critical of Tesla. But I think one thing they’re doing right is positioning their vehicles as a premium product that’s worth the asking price.

Posted in Cars, Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Random notes: April 8, 2014.

Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

For the historical record, your Mickey Rooney obit roundup: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.

The author Peter Matthiessen has also passed away after an illness. The only work of Matthiessen’s that I’ve read so far is In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which made a strong impression on me at the time. Further, I say not, as I’d sound too much like TJIC. Anyway: A/V Club. NYT. NYT Magazine article published shortly before Matthiessen’s death.

Thanks to “That Guy” for providing a Houston Press link with more details about the Damian Mandola story. There’s also an update in the Statesman: Austin Eater has a story which links to the Statesman, so this may let you get around the paywall.

…security researchers say that in most cases, attackers hardly need to go to such lengths when the management software of all sorts of devices connects directly to corporate networks. Heating and cooling providers can now monitor and adjust office temperatures remotely, and vending machine suppliers can see when their clients are out of Diet Cokes and Cheetos. Those vendors often don’t have the same security standards as their clients, but for business reasons they are allowed behind the firewall that protects a network.
Security experts say vendors are tempting targets for hackers because they tend to run older systems, like Microsoft’s Windows XP software. Also, security experts say these seemingly innocuous devices — videoconference equipment, thermostats, vending machines and printers — often are delivered with the security settings switched off by default. Once hackers have found a way in, the devices offer them a place to hide in plain sight.

Heh. Heh. Heh. (Also: remember some jerk saying “Titles like ‘Restaurant IT Guy’ or ‘SysAdmin for Daniel’ are going to become a thing, if they aren’t already.”? I didn’t even think about the “Hey, let’s put malware on the server for that Chinese place that everyone orders from! That’ll give us a back door into the Federal Reserve!” scenario.)

Al Sharpton: FBI informant.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Am I crazy?

Friday, March 14th, 2014

I know, I know, but seriously: am I crazy?

John Gruber linked to an interview with “The Setup” (“What do people use to get stuff done?”) by John McAfee. Yes, that John McAfee.

In the photo, it looks like he’s holding one of those GSG MP-5 clones in .22 LR. I’ll admit I could be wrong about that: it may be one of the Umarex guns instead, but I am 99 44/100ths percent sure it is one of those two .22LR clones. (The magazine is a dead giveaway.)

Quoth Mr. McAfee:

My tools for national security consulting are primarily a semi-auto .22 rifle with a silencer. They are virtually completely silent and can pierce car doors and other light armor. They are perfect for urban environments.

I will confess that I have not had a lot of occasion in my life to shoot through car doors. After all, I am not a tactical operator operating tactically in operations with tactics.

But a silenced .22 penetrating one? Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to see the Box of Truth or somebody shoot through a car door with a silenced .22 before I believe that.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day, everyone!

Friday, March 14th, 2014

I’ve been messing around a little with QuickPi 4.5 on my free time at work; that’s a fun little program.

And here’s a Pi Day article from the LAT which includes complaints from the usual bunch of whiners who think pi should be replaced by tau. I bet these same people think Pluto isn’t a planet.

These people are why we can’t have nice things any longer.

Edited to add: So apparently, Tau Day is June 28th. Interesting. You know what else June 28th is? That’s right: Gavrilo Princip Day!

Edited to add 2:

o Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz detected
o Processor speed measured at 2.70 GHz
o Single processor with eight cores and 2-way SMT per core
o 4.0 GB of memory available
o Using custom training data

Computation of Pi to 1,073,741,824 digits
Method used : Chudnovsky
Started : Fri Mar 14 10:07:24 2014

Series size : 75713477 (1,073,741,838 digits)
Computing series, time : 2144.09
Computing final value, time : 397.05

Total time : 2541.15 seconds (42 mins, 21.15 secs)
Total memory used : 4,259,072,015 (3.97 GB)

Total disk space used : 3,319,660,544 (3.09 GB)
Time spent swapping : 198.01 (153.65 reading, 44.36 writing)

Processor utilization : 274.33%

Posted in Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

My humps, my humps…

Friday, February 14th, 2014

A camel that escaped from a Palmdale property and began charging people and cars is now in the custody of animal control officials.

Thoughts:

1. I admit I’ve written some bad Perl code. But I don’t recall writing any that ran away. SQL queries, yes, but not Perl code.
2. “Runaway Camel” sort of sounds like a stunt organized by those truth jackasses.
3. I have a “primates” tag; do I need a “mammals” tag?

Edited to add: I think I do need a “mammals” tag, and an associated “camels” tag. But even though primates are mammals, I don’t feel right moving the “primates” tag under the “mammals” tag, so I’m keeping them separate for now.

Posted in California Über Alles, Camels, Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law, Mammals, Perl, Programming Languages | 1 Comment »

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Friday, February 14th, 2014

How about a little musical interlude? This is one of my favorite songs; oddly enough, it is also the only one I can think of off the top of my head that works for both Valentine’s Day and Halloween.

And if you haven’t purchased something for your significant other yet, you may wish to check this out. Usual conflict of interest disclaimer applies.

Posted in Geek, Music | Comments Closed

Kickstart me!

Sunday, February 2nd, 2014

I went shooting this afternoon with some folks, including Lawrence and Mike the Musicologist. Then we went to dinner. And at dinner, I came up with an idea. Even better, my idea has almost nothing to do with my previous post. (It does use some of the same technology.)

Those of my readers who are People of the Gun probably know what a ballistic chronograph is. For those who aren’t: briefly, a ballistic chronograph measures how fast a bullet is going. You place a stand that has two evenly spaced “screens” in front of your gun, and then fire a bullet through the screens. As the bullet passes through each screen, the screen detects the bullet’s passage. The screens are a known distance apart, so by measuring the time difference between the bullet’s passage between the screens, you can determine how fast the bullet is going. Typically, the screens are connected by a cable to a “head unit” that displays the velocity of the last shot, as well as keeping records for all shots in a session (including averages and standard deviations).

Ammunition catalogs will typically give you a muzzle velocity, but that assumes a certain barrel length, certain atmospheric conditions, and other factors. If you really want to know how fast a particular load from your gun is – or if you load your own ammunition, which wouldn’t be in a catalog – you want a ballistic chronograph. (Knowing velocities is also important in determining trajectories; for example, how much a bullet of a certain shape that starts out at a certain velocity will drop at 100 yards, 200 yards, 300 yards, and so on.)

That’s kind of a simplified introduction. Here’s my idea: why not put Bluetooth into the base that has the screens on it? And then, make your “head unit”, the part that displays the velocity and calculates averages, standard deviation, et al, an iPhone/Android app? You pair the screen base with your phone using the app; the phone has all the smarts and does all the calculations. You probably don’t need anything more complex in the base than the equivalent of a Bluetooth headset; just something to send the elapsed time over to the phone.

I see two good things about this: first, you’re saving some money on hardware because you don’t need a “head unit”, just the screens and an app. Second. when you want to upgrade the chronograph with “additional features”, all you really need to do is upgrade the phone app; the piece with the screens can be really dumb, since it just measures elapsed time between the bullet crossing the screens. All the real effort can be handled by the app that communicates with the screens.

Standard Bluetooth (like your wireless headset uses) has a range of about 30 feet, or 10 yards. My understanding is that most people put their chronograph screens somewhere around 5 yards from the muzzle, so that’s maybe 15 or 20 feet. We can figure that there won’t be any obstructions between the phone (which is probably sitting on the shooting bench) and the screen unit, so Bluetooth ought to work for this. If we’re really worried, we could make the link Bluetooth Class 1 instead of Class 2, which would give us about 100 yards of range between the screen unit and the phone, but I think that’s probably overkill.

The only possible drawback I can see is power: the screens are going to need their own power source, but you could easily put a fairly large rechargeable battery into the base of the unit. Enabling Bluetooth on the phone and using the app is going to suck up some battery power, but I’m thinking no more so than a Bluetooth headset. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get at least two to three hours of chronographing with your iPhone before it needed recharging (depending on how much of a charge you started with). If your sessions at the range testing hand loads run all day, an external battery pack for your phone solves that problem.

A quick Google search turns up nothing like this idea, and I don’t see any reason why it can’t work. If you do, please post in comments. If you like this idea and have the skills to build it, you’re welcome to take the ball and run with it; I’d put up a Kickstarter for it, except I have no EE skills that would enable me to build this device, and I don’t know anyone who does have those skills.

Posted in Geek, Guns | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »